If his job on TV is any guide, "dad" is earning more than twice what he used to. This Father's Day, Salary.com has revealed what the most popular TV dad characters of all-time would bring home in real-life. The results may surprise you. The average TV dad salary, in today's dollars, has more than doubled since the early days of television. This increased income for TV dads is fueled by the popular TV dad jobs of today, such as lawyer, neurosurgeon, psychiatrist, and real estate developer.

Starting in the 1980s, we began seeing popular TV dads like Philip Drummond of "Diff'rent Strokes" and Cliff Huxtable of "The Cosby Show" start to earn higher incomes. Since then, TV dad salaries have been on the rise. Salary.com's team of compensation experts studied a sampling of 60 TV fathers from the most popular television shows over the past six decades. Today's TV dads have an average salary of $195,000 per year, which is more than twice the salary of their 1950's counterparts, who were earning the equivalent of $75,000 (in 2005 dollars).

Plastic surgeon Sean McNamara of "Nip/Tuck" and lawyer Sandy Cohen of "The OC", along with their healthy salaries, have long since replaced the more modestly paid Ward Cleaver and Fred Flintstone dad types of yesterday. According to Bill Coleman, Senior VP of Compensation at Salary.com, "on average, today's TV dads have jobs that pay significantly more and their jobs are also seen as more glamorous than jobs held by their counterparts from the popular shows of the past." Coleman added, "but what's more interesting is that throughout the history of television, many of the most memorable and iconic dads are paid about the same. Take Ward Cleaver of 'Leave It To Beaver,' Archie Bunker of 'All In The Family' and Ray Barone of 'Everybody Loves Raymond,' for example. Those characters would all be paid a mid-forties salary today in real life. Television continues to reflect society and the average American continues to relate to the average dad with the average job and the average salary."

We ranked the sampling of 60 TV dad salaries from popular shows since the 1950s. Ten dads were used in each decade solely to compute the TV dad salary average. Based on jobs and their 2005 market salaries, Hollywood's depiction of popular fathers has been moving up the corporate ladder at a rate of about 21 percent per decade.

Click on your favorite dad to see his benchmark job and would-be June 2005 salary.